This Week In Review

November 03, 2007|By Steve Siegal Special to The Morning Call - Freelance

The Blue Man Group rocked Stabler Arena Thursday night with a multimedia, multicolored mega-performance of its "How to be a Megastar Tour 2.1" that had a cell phone-waving, paper streamer-covered audience cheering for almost 90 minutes.

Following an opener by DJ/multi-media artist Mike Relm, multiple banks of strobe lights flashed as the Blue Men appeared on stage like curious visitors from another planet. They peered at the crowd with quizzical expressions, explored the objects around them, beat drums and played bizarre instruments made out of large pieces of PVC pipe.

After "borrowing" a credit card from someone in the audience to download a how-to manual for becoming rock megastars, they donned sunglasses, tried on weird rock-star codpieces, and practiced classic rock-star gestures. They threw marshmallows and paper streamers into the audience and caught paint balls in their mouths.

With an eight-piece rock band and female vocalist standing on a multi-level platform behind them, they pounded away on drums lit up like neon signs, raising iridescent showers into the air.

Surrounded by dense fog, flashing strobe lights and video screens displaying a psychedelic light show straight out of the 1970s, they not only lampooned the most over-the-top rock concert imaginable, they produced one.

The most impressive sequence for me was a marvelous multimedia commentary on conformity, performed to the lyrics of their song "The Complex," with images of endless rows of cubicles and workers wearing faceless masks projected on video screens. And the outrageous finale, based on the Who's "Baba O'Riley" ("Teenage Wasteland"), proved the Blue Men had earned their mega-stardom.